With the debate over the debt ceiling raging in Congress and the countries credit rating hanging in the balance, President Obama’s social media team sent out more than 100 tweets asking his followers to contact Republican Members of Congress to compromise. During this tweet barrage the President lost some 36,000 followers which resulted in scores of articles describing this as a tactical failure.
Whether you agree with the President’s position or not, the loss of 36,000 followers out of a total following of just over 9.4 million before this campaign, amounts to a loss of just .38%. That would be like 9 of my followers leaving me after I tweet this blog post (I think my ego can afford this loss – my ego also realizes that this would generate no press coverage whatsoever).
The real question is whether this campaign had any impact on the conversation/debate occurring in Congress:
Clearly some members of Congress, like Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) responded to the President’s tweet: “@BarackObama Instead of tweeting me about a balanced approach Mr. President—you should balance America’s #budgetlike #Wyoming does #BBAmdt29 Jul ,” while many others did not engage in the President’s conversation.
The real question is whether the campaign had any affect on Obama’s followers, beyond those who unfollowed the twitter feed? Did his followers respond to the challenge and tweet, email, and /or call their Congressional delegation urging a compromise? If just 1% of his followers did, that would correspond to some 94,000 contacts, or on the average, 830 for each of his 113 targeted tweets. Most advocacy groups using social media for outreach would view that as a huge success (quite frankly those using traditional outreach would be pleased as well).
Before jumping on the bandwagon and pointing to one metric as a measure of success or failure, it is important to assess the entire campaign, to the extent possible, before reaching any particular conclusion. With all of the media coverage, both social and traditional on this issue, we may never know how much interaction with Congress the President’s tweeting generated, but it certainly would be worth trying to assess. Do you think this campaign was a success or failure? What metrics would you use to assess it?
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